In The Arena by TechArena - Doug Finke on Quantum Computing’s Commercial Future

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Quantum computing is moving from research labs into the real world. In this episode of Data Insights, Allyson Klein and Jeniece Wnorowski sit down with Doug Finke, chief content officer at Global Quantum Intelligence, to unpack where the industry stands today and what comes next.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name's Allison Klein. And today, this is a Data Insights episode, which means I'm here with Janice Farrowski. Hey, Janice, how are you doing? Hi, Allison. I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing awesome. And we have such an exciting interview today. I just want to go. right to it. Tell me what we're going to be talking about today and who you brought with you. Yes, we're going to follow up on all things quantum. It's definitely a topic that's been heating up for

some time now. So today we have Doug Fink. Duck, welcome to the program. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. So Doug, you are chief content officer at Global Quantum Intelligence, and I know that this is going to be an exciting episode about quantum computing. Why don't you share a little bit about your background and a little bit about global pods and intelligence because this is the first time that you guys have been on the program. Okay. Thank you. So a little bit about my background. I jokingly refer to myself as a refugee from classical computing. I graduated with a degree in computer engineering. My first job out of school was as a mainframe computer designer at IBM in New York, worked at Intel. I worked at several Silicon Valley startups. And about

10 years ago, actually 11 years ago, I got interested in quantum computing. I'd always been involved in many of my roles in the past in high performance computing. And I saw that it was a new way of doing high performance computing that was completely different from what I had previously seen. So I got interested, and again, this was in the 2015 type of timeframe. And what I saw at the time was that no one was really reporting on it. You know, occasionally you see some of these PhD-level lectures or whatever, but there was no one in the media who was really reporting on it. There was really only one company called D-Wave that had any type of offering.

So I felt there was a hole there, and I decided to be the first media site to really report on that. At the time, I thought a lot of computer was interesting research. I didn't know how much it would grow, but I think, as we all know now, over the past decade, really grown exponentially. It's really becoming a major element of the computing ecosystem. And I've run this website. It's called Quantum ComputingReportingReport.com, ever since 2015. And along the way, I picked up a few partners, Andre Kournick in Florida, Dr. David Shaw, in London. And we formed a company. We merged some of our activities together, and we formed a company called Global Quantum Intelligence. And Global Quantum Intelligence. And Global

Quantum Intelligence is a leading business intelligence firm for the industry. We work with governments. We work with venture capitalists. We work with end users. We work with the quantum providers and the tech majors. And we help guide them. We collect a lot of data on what's happening in industry. And we have very smart people. We have over 20 people on our staff now. Almost a third of them are PhDs. And we help guide some of our clients with regards to what's happening in quantum. Sometimes I say we try to prevent our clients from doing dumb things. But in the meantime, the site I started, Quantum Computer Report.com, you still keep it as sort of our fraying news site. But beyond that, we have much, much more. So it's been quite successful.

And I think we'll continue to grow with the industry. Right. So, Doug, with all that said, you mentioned you analyzed the global quantum technology space through the lens of market intelligence and industry strategy. But from your fan point, how would you describe the current stage of maturity for quantum in the overall ecosystem? I would say it's probably graduated from the childhood to the teenage years. The progress is really accelerating. We're seeing much, much more funding now, many more technical papers, patents, those types of things. And, you know, people are really starting to do some very, very impressive of things in quantum. I think it's sort of in the transition right now from research to commercialization.

It's sort of in that in-between zone right now. But we are very, very optimistic that you'll see more and more commercialization over the next several years. The quantum industry includes a wide range of players, and it goes over the gamut from hardware companies and software platforms to even cloud providers. Governments are obviously involved. And there's a huge investor community growing in this space. How do you see that ecosystem evolving today? And where are the most important dynamics emerging amongst those players? It's interesting. One of the things we do track, we have a page that's called private startups, and we track the number of startups. I think it's in the hundreds. So one of the ways that I try to analyze these types of things is I look at other technology markets

in the past. I mean, going back to the automobile industry, the semiconductor industry, the PC, industry and all those industries started with many, many players. But as the industry matured, basically the number of different people whittled down. Some companies went bankrupt. There were a lot of mergers. There's a lot of positions, those types of things. And I do believe that there'll be some winnowing, let's say. The strongest will survive. A lot of optimism right now. But again, that's just part of the process and it happens with every technology. Now, what if the ongoing questions in quantum is, how is the industry transitions from research-driven innovation to real kind of commercial markets? What signals do you look for that suggest that the sector is moving towards sustainable commercial adoption?

Yeah, so there's a lot of other words floating around quantum supremacy, quantum advantage, those types of things. You know, so some of the very first things, there was a very famous experiment that was done by Google in 2019, where they showed that they could come up with a simulated problem. It wasn't a real world problem or anything, but they came up with some type of problem, and they showed that their quantum computer could solve that problem faster than a classical computer. The issue was it wasn't really applicable. What they did wasn't applicable to any real-world commercial use case. We have since seen several other examples of those types of things.

We are now getting closer. There was one just earlier this week of a company that is doing some simulations of what's called a Fermi Hubbard model, which could have some real world use cases. And we're getting closer and closer to that. But the thing that I really look at, I really want to see people using the quantum applications and using quantum solutions. on a production basis, in production, on a daily or weekly basis.

Because I think what some people don't realize is you can do a one-time proof of concept and you can show that you've done this great thing. But to enter that into a large enterprise is non-trivial. There's a lot of things you have to do to integrate that application with your whole IT infrastructure. You have to train people. you have to write documentation, you have to do testing. And that actually is quite significant.

That's the thing that I really keep my eyes on is not just who's making an announcement and publishing it in something like Nature Magazine, but who says that they have customers using it on a production basis on a weekly or daily basis. Now, you talk about the quantum advantage and application targets. I think when I go into quantum circles, the debate is always about the timeline for when this is going to become a broader reality. Where do you see we are right now and where do you still see gaps? So the era that we're in, the term is called NISQ, NISQ, which stands for near term, intermediate stage quantum. And the key characteristic of that is it does not use error correction.

So one of the biggest technical issues in a quantum computer is that when you apply gate or the cubits, they have errors and much more frequently than you would with a standard semiconductor. So there's a lot of work right now, a lot of research that's happening with what's called error corrected quantum computers. You can basically apply various algorithms, various codes that will bunch what we're called physical cubits together and create a logical cubit. and that will dramatically decrease the air rate, we would call the logical air rate. And I think a big inflection point's going to happen when the quantum computers that utilize this air correction are publicly available at our in production.

Right now, there's several quantum computers that are available on the cloud through various cloud services, as well as people will say a quantum computer, but they're all NIST machines. So our prediction is that there will be, a handful of applications. People are very, very smart, and they'll be able to figure out a few engineers will be able to work out how to work around those ears and put those, an application production, like I was saying with NIST. But the knee of the curve is really going to happen

once the air corrected funer appears available. And that's maybe three or four years from now that you'll start seeing significant ones with enough cubits that can do real work. Got it. So with that, Doug, as organizations began exploring quantum technologies, how are their approaches changing compared to a few years ago? Are you seeing more companies become more strategic about how they engage with the ecosystem? It varies by companies. I think if you were to ask me, what's the biggest difference between what I'm seeing today

versus what I'm seeing two, three years ago is a much, much greater focus on your correction for the reasons I would just say a minute ago, that people realize that for quantum computers to really reach the potential, they really need to have their correction. The other change that I think is a little bit more prevalent now than I saw two or three years ago, it's a question also that people see in the classical industry. When you have an application, do you want to put it on the cloud,

or do you want to install a computer in your own facility and run it there? And two or three years ago, I think most people would say, we'll do it on the cloud. We are seeing an increased size of installations. More and more companies are installing computers on their own premises. I think some of that may be for security reasons. Some of that may be due to the fact that they have a lot of work and they don't want to wait to two that you'd have to do in a cloud. So we are seeing more of that.

And I think for the quantum hardware providers that creates, some opportunities because it basically increases their market. And it's a lot better for financial standpoint to sell one computer for $20 to $30 million than to sell time at so many dollars per minute. So those are two things that I see changing, that have been changes over the past couple of years. Now, I know that you're looking across this landscape very deeply. You talked about the integration of error correction. Are there other trends, whether it's, it's a baseline technology integration into quantum or emerging companies that you would signal that are particularly interesting in terms of deserving attention right now?

There are a couple. You know, another thing that I think people are looking at closely, it's what's called hybrid computing, where you have a quantum computer and a classical computer working together. And many of the algorithms that the scientists are coming up with basically use both. They'll use reprocessing classically. They'll do some type of quantum computation. We'll have some post-processing, which is also classical, and it

may actually repeat in a loop. So there are a lot of things that people have to pay attention to really make that effective. Most people would say that quantum computing is going to be sort of like an auxiliary processor to your classical computer in much the same way that GPUs

are in data centers today. You probably won't have a standalone own quantum computer. So there is a lot of work being done. You know, NVIDIA has come up with some platforms that will help people do that. And that is one of the things I think that you can see a little bit more of. Yeah. Having spent time at events and having conversations across the quantum community, what kinds of themes or shifts in the industry conversations? What are some of the things that have really stood out to you? I would say that there has been some very, very interesting software announcements recently. Typically, when a company comes up with an advancement,

they will write a technical paper published in nature or something like that, and they may mention it at a conference. You know, there are a bunch of technical conferences. IBM just earlier this week had their think conference. That's where a company called Q-Control talked about this for me, Hubbard thing. So I think one of the areas that people should also look at, which may not get as much attention as it should, is the software area. Because people will write about how quantum is progressing and they'll talk about the qubits, the number of qubits and the fidelity of the qubits and those types of things. But you know, you have to remember that if you have a great quantum computer but no software for it, it's not going to help you at all.

One of the things that I've been impressed, you know, the past six months is a number of the new things on the software side. And one of the things that people are really emphasizing is how to make the software more efficient. Because to solve a problem, people will typically tell you how many cubits are needed, but how many operations on those cubits. And we have a measure in our company called QWOP, Q-U-O-P. quantum operations, which means good quantum operations. And we actually take how many millions of quantum operations you can successfully do before you run it into an area. And what some of these folks are doing in software, which I think is really impressive, is they're taking software that may be, let's say, I just can use my hands, these many quops and figure out a way to correct the software

so it's more efficient, more smarter, and can actually solve the same problem with fewer quantum operations. And we saw that recently. Google just put out a paper on that. There's a company some research from Caltech that did that. And you're going to see more of that. But for whatever reason, I don't think the popular press really talks about the advances in software as much as they should. You know, as you look at that in your study and those trends, what would you say about where we're going to be as a whole in five to ten years and what does success look like for this industry? What milestones are you looking for to know that we're on track? So we definitely think that, you know, the next five or ten years will certainly be used on a production basis as saying before. I think you will see very significant rise. We will pass that inflection point.

As something to compare against, I think it will be a subset of the HPC market. The HPC market is somewhere between $50 and $100 billion. It will continue to grow. You will have CIOs and CTOs actually have applications in production in their enterprises. They will have figured out how to integrate all those in their IT system. And it'll be sort of a very significant portion of the computing industry in much the same way that GPUs are a significant portion of computing industry too.

But the real thing that I do want to mention, I think is very important that I think these IT managers are going to have to really pay attention to. And that is, we'll call it the risk in quantum computing related to cybersecurity. Because one of the key algorithms in quantum computing is called Shor's algorithm that can break the RSA encryption code that we use today in the Internet. So the risk is that the bad guys will get their hands on a quantum computer and start breaking code. So from a IT manager standpoint, they need to pay very, very close attention to that because they're going to have to do a lot of work in their IT infrastructure to find all the areas where they're using what's called asymmetrical cryptography for key distribution,

and they're going to have to upgrade those areas. That's a very important thing, and that will also impact significantly, again, the CIOs who might be watching this. I really appreciate, Doug, how clear you've been, and it's just so easy to understand. And I'm sure our listeners are super eager to learn about more on this topic. Where do you suggest they go to learn more from you and others? We do have the website as I mentioned again. I'll say it again. It's quantum computing report.com.

Computingreport.com is one word. One of the things that we do have right on the homepage there, we have a sign up for our weekly newsletter. We send out a newsletter every Sunday that has all the things that happened over the past week. So for people who want to stay in touch with what's happening in the industry, they don't want to necessarily be. bombarded by emails or have to go through hundreds of posts on LinkedIn or whatever. We curate what's happening. And if you sign up for that, it's run on the homepage. You'll get something in your inbox and you'll be able to see the key things that happened

over the past week. Other than that, people who need, let's say, more in depth, they're thinking about engaging in quantum or have more detailed questions. They can contact me. My email address is Doug, D-O-U-G at global-Q-Q-I.com. And again, we have a really large staff who can work on really tough problems and help guide people with regard to their strategic decisions on them. Thank you so much for being on the program today, Doug.

It was a real pleasure. And once you, Genev, awesome interview. Thanks so much for bringing the fantastic guest to the table. Awesome. Thank you, Allison. And thank you so much, Doug. Thank you. great to be on this program.

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